LG Watch Style

£TBC ($249) • lg.com/uk

The LG Watch Style is one of the first watches to boast Google’s new An­droid Wear 2.0, which brings with it a new de­sign, bet­ter nav­i­ga­tion, and Google As­sis­tant, along with a host of other tweaks.

Price

So far LG hasn’t yet con­firmed that the Watch Style or its sib­ling the Watch Sport are com­ing to the UK, but we are ex­pect­ing them to an­nounce a UK re­lease even­tu­ally. You’d ex­pect that they’d want to man­age a re­lease be­fore too many other watches get Wear 2.0 though, so we don’t think there will be too long to wait, es­pe­cially since the Style is

al­ready out in the US. As for pric­ing, it costs $249 in the US right now, so we’d ex­pect a UK price in the £220 to £250 range – we’ll up­date this re­view as soon as we know more. That would put the Watch Style up against the Moto 360 2 and Sam­sung Gear S2, at which point $249 feels like a steep ask­ing price given the fea­tures on of­fer here.

De­sign

In case the name didn’t give it away, the Watch Style has been de­signed with aes­thet­ics firmly in mind. The body is slim and un­der­stated, with a matt fin­ish on the front and a small crown on the right-hand side. The 1.2in P-OLED dis­play is a com­fort­able size, though is sur­rounded by a frus­trat­ingly thick bezel, which feels es­pe­cially ironic given that LG has made such a point of re­duc­ing the bezels on its new G6 phone. Mean­while the back of the body is a sim­ple plas­tic cover, which feels slightly cheap.

The watch is avail­able in three colours: sil­ver, ti­ta­nium, and rose gold. You get even more op­tions with the straps, which by de­fault come in black, camel, or cream leather. There’s also a range of other straps avail­able to buy sep­a­rately, both in leather and rub­ber, and the good news is that swap­ping the straps out is re­ally quick and easy us­ing the built-in clasps.

Hard­ware

The Watch Style is pow­ered by the same Snap­dragon Wear 2100 pro­ces­sor as the more ex­pen­sive Watch Sport, and backs it up with 4GB stor­age and 512MB of DDR3 RAM. Paired with the

new An­droid Wear 2.0 soft­ware, it’s more than enough horse­power to make sure the Style is snappy and re­spon­sive, and in our time with the de­vice we never no­ticed any lag or ir­ri­tat­ing de­lays.

Where the Style might come un­stuck is its 240mAh bat­tery. LG prom­ises the de­vice should last all day, but we’re a bit scep­ti­cal, and some US re­view­ers have al­ready re­ported prob­lems with keep­ing the Style charged up. The watch also fea­tures wire­less charg­ing, IP67 wa­ter and dust re­sis­tance, and Wi-Fi and Blue­tooth.

Most damn­ing are the fea­tures it doesn’t in­clude: there’s no 4G, no GPS, no NFC, and no heart-rate mon­i­tor. Sure, many smart­watch users won’t need all of those, but it’s hard to imag­ine many peo­ple won’t want at least some of those fea­tures. It’s es­pe­cially trou­ble­some given the Style’s price – $249 is a lot to pay for a de­vice miss­ing many of the fea­tures peo­ple have come to ex­pect from a smart­watch, and it’s hard to shake the feel­ing that the Style is very lim­ited.

Soft­ware

If the hard­ware is a bit of a mixed bag, at least the Watch Style gets to show off An­droid Wear 2.0. As men­tioned above, the OS is quick and re­spon­sive, with none of the slug­gish­ness found on some early Wear de­vices.

There’s been a re­design and sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the vi­su­als and in­ter­face, and one of the big­gest im­prove­ments is in nav­i­ga­tion. Swip­ing is no longer the only way to nav­i­gate around the OS: you can now scroll us­ing ei­ther the touch­screen or the ro­tat­ing crown on the side of the face, which

also dou­bles as a home but­ton. This feels re­ally smooth and in­tu­itive, though we imag­ine it could be awk­ward at times if your other hand gets in the way of the crown.

You also get Google As­sis­tant built in, which should mean more and bet­ter ways to con­trol the Watch Style us­ing your voice and bet­ter in­te­gra­tion with other Google ser­vices. What you won’t get is An­droid Pay, be­cause the Style doesn’t have NFC, so you won’t be us­ing it to make any pay­ments.

Wear 2.0 seems like a ma­jor up­date for the op­er­at­ing sys­tem, and the Watch Style makes the most of it, but it’s worth re­mem­ber­ing that plenty of cur­rent mod­els will be get­ting up­dated to the new soft­ware over the com­ing months any­way. They may not have the crown scrolling func­tion­al­ity of the Style, but other­wise they should still of­fer the full Wear 2.0 ex­pe­ri­ence.

Ver­dict

The LG Watch Style looks and feels great, and we love Wear 2.0 and the new crown scrolling, but be­yond that it’s just too lim­ited given the price. Without NFC, GPS, 4G, or a heart-rate mon­i­tor the Style feels over­priced, and you can get more for less from some of the other wear­ables on the mar­ket. Do­minic Pre­ston